When starting off a new website project for yourself in a particular niche, its always important to consider a few things when purchasing that domain name to give you an excellent base in regards to setting yourself up for good search engine optimisation in the future.

This article is a part of a series of search engine optimisation hints and tips that will guide you through the basics of getting a good starting platform for your Joomla website in terms of a search engine optimisation strategy.

Choosing a Domain for Your Niche

So first and foremost, you will need some sort of domain name for whatever site you are building and make sure that the domain name that you're choosing has at least one of the keywords that you're aiming at to get a good result for in Google.

This is where some research is needed in regards to the niche and market that you are trying to get into. There are many tools out there that will help you find out if the particular niche is suitable or not to approach such as Market Samurai.

In this case scenario I'm going to aim to get number 1 positioning for the term "Potts Point Pizza". Potts Point is an area near Kings Cross in Sydney, Australia. I live around the area and work there too so it will be quite easy for me to collect data etc and build up a website around Pizza in Potts Point. The added bonus is that I really like pizza.

So I've determined the keyword phrase that I'll be aiming for that that is "Potts Point Pizza". This only 210 for that term on a monthly basis so it shouldn't upset too many people if I hit number one, and should be easy to do as there is little competition for the keyword. I'll see what I can do a little with the domain and website in terms of monetizing it and selling advertising or something similar.

Now from the search results that I've just captured (16th May 2013), I can see that King Slice is in position one, a whole bunch of location based search results rank for the next space of positions and then Doughboy Pizza at the end.

So my goal is to first appear on the page, and then slowly crawl up the ranking space and beat Doughboy Pizza and King Slice. Wish me luck!

Now to be fair in the search engine usage, I also have made a snap shot of the Bing search results for the same keyword.

Like I mentioned earlier, the best approach is to try and purchase the domain name that has the keywords that you're aiming for in the domain name itself. Luckily for my the domain name PottsPointPizza.com was available making this task a little easier.

This is actually the perfect domain name for my case study as it is the entire search phrase that I'm aiming for.

I can cater for long tail search terms around this as well later on such as "Potts Point Pizza Vegan" or "Vegetarian Pizza places in Potts Point".

Domain Age

Another contributing factor in a domain name is how old the domain name is. The older the domain name is the more potential it may have to have been an authoritive domain or already been crawled by Google. If it has already been indexed and crawled by Google it will make life just that little bit easier in terms of getting new content pushed up the ranks of the search engine page results.

I usually go to a website like Flippa.com to buy a old domain name that has a bit of age and authority to it. In this case Flippa didn't yeild any good results for me and my best option was to purchase the keyword rich domain name.

Searching and Buying the Domain Name

Searching for the domain name and buying it is the easy part. As always I recommend SiteGround* for all hosting related options as they provide you with a domain name for free and have a 60% off their hosting signups as well so it is a great deal overall.

Jump on the home page of the website and fill in the name of the domain name that you might want. If it isn't available then it will give you a few potential options randomly. Really good if you get stuck for ideas.

Once you have gone through the process, you'll have a domain name and your hosting ready with them.

Of course there are many other domain name providers out there and a little search will yield in many others that can provide similar deals or rates.

What Next?

So I have my domain name and hosting all ready to go, all I have to do is start putting a site together and optimise it for the search engines.

In the next part of this case study series I'll be talking about putting the site together with Joomla on the hosting environment and then start to add content and optimise it watching how it ranks as I do.

Subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the email list and see how I go with this process and learn from my experiences in getting to number 1 in Google with Joomla.

Peter Bui

An all round web specialist with years of experience in web design, development and open source solutions at PB Web Development

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The Joomla Beat Podcast aims to deliver great and insightful hints and tips in regards to designing, building and managing websites. We like to do it in a fun and entertaining way. The podcast is hosted by Peter Bui and Martina Kocian, both with years of...

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